Some Graphs

Back in 2016, I made an early New Year's resolution to blog more
diligently. This was unusual, in that it was actually successful.
Since December 2016, I've managed to blog for 738 consecutive days. Woo!
I'll try to keep going in 2019.

There's twelve more months of data on the chart
showing the monthly blog posts since Pun
Salad's birth in February 2005:
(Hat tip: the Chart::Gnuplot
Perl module)

Once a geek develops a hammer, it's tough to stop finding nails to pound.
Here's an updated chart on my book reading; you can tell that I've been
trying to read more over the past few years:

And movies watched since 2004…

For the curious: My 2018 book list is
here;
my 2018 movie list is
here.

It's great to make people more aware of bad mental habits and encourage better ones, as many people have done on LessWrong. The way we deal with weak thinking is, however, like how people dealt with depression before the development of effective anti-depressants:

Clinical depression was only marginally treatable.

It was seen as a crippling character flaw, weakness, or sin.

Admitting you had it could result in losing your job and/or friends.

Treatment was not covered by insurance.

Therapy was usually analytic or behavioral and not very effective.

People thus went to great mental effort not to admit, even to themselves, having depression or any other mental illness.

I've been having (mostly inchoate) thoughts in the same vein for a
while: consider the population distribution of measures of human
mental behavior: there will always be people several sigma away from (above
or below) the mean on each measure.

Yet we label some of those indicators as mental
illness, and
hence absolve the holder of responsibility for them.

Conversely, we treat other of those indicators as "character
flaws" something
people are "responsible" for, and shower them with praise or blame,
as appropriate.

Deciding which is which? Largely up to the folks that write the
DSM.
In other words, politics.

That seems inapt. But I have a difficult time coming up with
anything better.

Perhaps this strikes you as something less than a stop-the-presses revelation. The internet, after all, has been expanding and accelerating for the past 25 years. Why should 2018 have been any different?

Yet last year, when the Federal Communications Commission moved to repeal the Obama administration’s “Net Neutrality” rule, much of the liberal establishment went berserk. Many in the media were sure the change would mean the “end of the internet as we know it.” A lavish online campaign backed by dozens of organizations issued a “Red Alert,” warning that if the FCC under Chairman Ajit Pai overturned the Obama regulations, it would “give the big cable companies control over what we see and do online” and “allow widespread throttling, blocking, censorship, and extra fees.” A New York Times business journalist bewailed the coming demise of the internet — undoing net neutrality, he wrote, “would be the final pillow in its face.” Other tech analysts were even more caustic. Nilay Patel, the editor of The Verge, proclaimed that with net neutrality gone, the internet was doomed. (“Doomed” wasn’t the word he used.)

You can click over to find out the word he used, but I bet you can
guess.

"Disaster continues to fail to strike" isn't the most gripping
headline, but is it too much to ask to be reminded that the
doomsayers, with their itchy regulatory trigger fingers, were
wrong?

At Cato, Jeffrey Miron notes how
Fentanyl
Test Strips exemplify how drug prohibition makes Your Federal
Government do some bizarre things. Briefly, the test strips can save
lives, but … guess what, the government opposes their distribution.
Miron outlines the "logic" involved:

The government’s position, therefore, is that

we have to outlaw drugs because people are not rational enough to use them safely;

if prohibition makes it difficult for users to determine potency and quality, that is unfortunate;

but if users respond to this uncertainty by taking steps that reduce the risks, we cannot trust them to do that since they might not get it exactly right.

"The only thing libertarian about our state is the motto," Greg
Raymond, 30, a ski resort server in Whitefield told The
Boston Globe. "Now it’s become an embarrassing motto: 'Live free
or die, but don't touch that plant.'"

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Unquoted opinions expressed herein are solely those of the
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